Broadband

Greg has some thoughts on the bee problems and how Taiwan is being affected by bees who leave their hives and get lost on the way home. Last year at the Communications Developer Conference I joked onstage about the latest forms of IP communications and how pigeons would play an important role in providing mesh-based WiFi networks of the future.
It seems now we need a tiny IP-based bee-cam to be placed on bees allowing scientists to see where these bees are going. Some of the theories scientists are offering are power lines or cellular signals disrupting the bees natural ability to navigate.
Something I haven’t read about is pollution being a problem but pesticides and weather are other theories that have been posed.
But the bee problem seems to have become a problem last year and power lines and cell phone signals haven’t increased so much in the last year have they? Remember this is a worldwide problem it seems.
If it is a technology problem then it would have to be a new wireless technology.

Interactive Intelligence announced today it has purchased the professional services group of Alliance Systems and I had a chance to speak with the president of Alliance Systems Rusty Cone about this deal. Rusty deferred to Alliance Systems chairman Jon Shapiro about the reason for this transaction.
According to Jon: “Our core server and infrastructure business has been growing very rapidly and we wanted to focus our resources on increasing our manufacturing capacity, engineering resources and our global logistics and support business.”
I did get a chance to find out a bit more about the transaction however. Rusty explained he is happy for the 14 people who will now be part of Interactive Intelligence as they now have more opportunity to move up in the organization.

We hear about hosted solutions from so many vendors these days. This area of the market is certainly experiencing tremendous growth. Companies like Covad, AccessLine and 8x8/Packet8 are doing well selling services to customers who are giving up their small phone system for a hosted solution.
In many cases the smaller companies are familiar with and more comfortable with key systems and are not happy to lose some of these features when they migrate to a hosted solution which is designed for companies the size of major auto manufacturers. The way to get around this dilemma is to sell these companies hosted key system replacements.
How can a service provider interested in deploying such solutions learn more?

Networks are converging at breakneck speed and as they do, so does the need to search and troubleshoot calls across multiple sites and networks. According to Avi Zamir, President of Radcom, his company is starting to see the need for converged monitoring tools across VoIP, cellular and IPTV networks.
Service providers are looking for a single management platform in his experience. To solve this problem his company has launched QTrace for mobile network operators. This solution can work on multiple servers if needed and allows operators to analyze all open calls or any subset of calls across the network.
QTrace at it’s heart is a user-friendly central management system.

I recently had a meeting with Huawei executives and they have grand plans. The company is a leading Chinese equipment provider and moreover has a surprisingly large suite of products ranging from EVDO cards for laptops to WiMAX and optical networking equipment.
In fact a look at the company’s product portfolio shows there are few products lacking from their arsenal. You name it and they seem to make it… Cell phones, DSL, 3G and FTTX are just a few other examples of where they excel.
Currently 60% of their business is international in nature while China accounts for the remainder of their business. They told me Europe and Asia are their fastest growing markets at the moment while in the US they have 20 customers and networks in 25 states.
An area which they hope to lead is in IMS and FMC solutions and they think they have the background in related technologies to be able to become the world leader in both.
Meeting with the company’s executives gives a fresh perspective on how Chinese companies differ from American ones.

Today is a momentous occasion for me as TMCnet has gone international developing continent-specific editions for Latin America, Europe, Asia the Middle East and Australia. You will find these country choices on a grey horizontal bar at the top of most of our pages. TMCnet is the largest communications and technology portal in the world and this move allows people everywhere to see news specific to their needs.

We believe this move is a good one for TMCnet visitors and the advertisers looking to cost-effectively target communications buyers – service providers, enterprise decision makers, resellers and developers worldwide
TMCnet has approximately 2 million unique visitors per month and here are Alexa’s statistics on TMCnet’s international reach as of this writing:
Tmcnet.com users come from these countries:
United States 54.6%
Canada 5.0%
United Kingdom 4.8%
India 4.2%
Australia 1.9%
Malaysia 1.5%
Germany 1.4%
Philippines 1.2%
Singapore 1.1%
Israel 1.1%
China 1.0%

One buzzword with legs is mobility. We hear the term everywhere these days. Moreover, it seems workforces are becoming more mobile by the day and knowledge workers are being created in segments previously not considered to be in this category. For example maintenance and housekeeping services in hotels are slowly becoming automated and have the latest mobile tools allowing their employers to be aware of their presence at all times.
Another buzzword we hear all the time is convergence.

Apparently the Verizon patents are sufficiently broad as to not allowVonage to have a workaround. This according to the USA Today. I was wondering myself how a workaround could take place on these patents as they seem to cover what the whole industry does and has been doing prior to Verizon even filing for the patents.
It would seem that if these patents are not overturned then Verizon will have a good deal of leverage over a variety of other VoIP companies as well.
In addition this issue could theoretically cause trouble for communications equipment providers.
Verizon is probably smart enough to pick on companies that are so small they aren’t a big enough threat to the patents they hold. But this story is far from over.